An Afternoon with the Ducks

Nora had a sun filled afternoon at Lake Ella yesterday. She loved watching the ducks and even began saying the word “duck” while we were there. Lake Ella is a public park popular for walkers right up the road from our house which we visit often and will be doing more so now that spring is in the air. Nora loves people watching, she either pointed, waved or said hi to almost every person, dog or duck that was walking around the lake.

Here’s a little video clip of Nora saying “duck”. It’s not very long but at least I caught her saying it a couple of times before the memory on the card filled up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_91DUmj7ypU

Yesterday was a much needed breath of fresh air of the stress from Thursday afternoon when I (Nora’s mom) accidentally dislodged Nora’s IV port needle. 🙁 I was putting her in her bed while she was wearing nothing but a diaper, which I rarely do, with her IV pump bag over my shoulder when what seemed like in slow motion I see the tape dressing covering her IV port pulling up. The slack in the IV line between her and the pump had gotten caught on something, which I’m still not quite sure what it was, but lesson learned, ALWAYS double check placement of her line and NEVER put her down in just a diaper. If she had been wearing clothes the tension on her line would have pulled at where her line comes out of her clothes first, but I was in a hurry and thought I could put her in her bed for just a minute while I got dressed………wrong. I immediately grabbed her up trying not to panic to check out the dressing, I could tell by the feel of the dressing that the needle had become dislodged and then that was confirmed when I tried to flush it and the saline wouldn’t go in. So I sterilize my hands, remove the dressing, take out the needle, put numbing cream over the port in preparation for a new needle and call Virginia, Nora’s nurse, and call Montana in from the office all the while cursing myself in my head for what had just happened. Nora was totally fine looking at me and smiling while I’m trying not to cry. I know these things happen and her needle has become dislodged before unexpectedly but when I’m the one putting her at risk for infection over actions that could have been avoided it is quite nerve wrecking. But thankfully the line didn’t break and I took the needle out right away so she wasn’t at anymore risk then she is every week when we change the dressing and put in a new needle but it still sucked. Virginia wasn’t working that day so we opted to put in a new needle ourselves instead of having the home health care company send over the nurse on call. We had Virginia train us to do needle changes for just these type of situations. The new needle went in fine and her port didn’t clot off, thank god since there was no way to flush it with heparin before taking the old one out. But for the next 72 hours after that (the maximum time for a line infection to show up) I replayed the removal of the old needle and the actions taken putting in the new one over and over in my head, second guessing that I had been as sterile as possible. I knew that I had followed all of the right steps and Montana reassured me all was ok but it was still hard to not worry. So the 72 hours came and went with no issues or fever, wheew. Now it’s time to take a deep breath, thank our lucky stars and take a break at the lake.